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ISSN 2516-8568

The Iconography of Kingship: Masques, Antimasques and

Pastorals

Author: Thomas Black

Source: Midlands Historical Review, Vol. 1 (2017)

Published: 16/11/2017

URL: http://www.midlandshistoricalreview.com/the-iconography-of-kingship-

masques-antimasques-and-pastorals/

Midlands Historical Review ISSN 2516-8568

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The Iconography of Kingship:

Masques, Antimasques and Pastorals

THOMAS BLACK

Imagining Men and Kings

In the third part of his trilogy on the image-making of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

English rulers, Kevin Sharpe argued that even after the fighting of Civil War broke out in

1642 ‘both sides had to claim the validating languages and symbols of kingship [i.e.]

Scripture, law, [and] the scales of justice.’1 As the war developed, and the subsequent

Protectorate took shape, the office of what James VI had termed the ‘little god,’ was

subjected to the democratising forces of repeated literary renegotiations.2 Moreover, the

most important writers of the day struggled to reimagine and to produce powerful images of

the state across a myriad of genres and mediums. Intrinsically bound to the debates about

constitutional forms are fundamental conceptions of man and his relationships with his fellow

men, with the natural world, and ultimately with God himself. In this sense the iconography of

man is interwoven with that of the king or state. As the republican theorist James Harrington

argued in his System of Politics (c. 1661), ‘as the form of a man is the image of God, so the

form of a government is the image of man.’3 Some of Andrew Marvell’s most powerful

pastoral poetry presents man in a circumscribed pastoral place, a place free to contemplate

his relation to the world. In The Garden Marvell imagines ‘that happy garden-state / While

man there walked without a mate,’ under the leaves of grass his mind is free to ‘Annihilat[e]

all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.’4 Marvell’s vision radically resituates

man, placing him in liberated, solitary, and direct contact with a world of immanent objects

and ideas unmediated by any prior authority. Others, such as Robert Filmer could invoke a

similar Edenic solitude only to bolster a vision of hierarchical order predicated on

monarchical power. He argues ‘a natural freedom of mankind cannot be supposed without

the denial of the creation of Adam,’ as Adam in his solitude was ‘the father, king, and lord.’5

1 K. Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660-1714 (New Haven, CT., 2013) p. 2. 2 King James VI of Scotland, The Basilicon Doron of King James VI, Waldegrave 1603 Text, (Ed. J. Craigie), 2 Vols. (Edinburgh, 1944), I, p .25. 3 J. Harrington, ‘A System of Politics’ in J.G.A. Pocock (Ed.), The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 267-294, 273. 4 A. Marvell, ‘The Garden’ in E. Donno (Ed.), Complete Poems (London, 2005), pp. 100-102, 57-58 , 47-48. 5 R. Filmer, ‘Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques’ in D. Wootton (Ed.), Democracy and Divine Right (London, 1986), pp. 110-120, 110.


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Masque and Antimasque – Iconographies of (Dis)order 1630-41

In his ‘gift’ to his heir, Basilicon Doron, James VI and I offered advice on how to rule, with

meditations on the nature of kingship itself. James wrote:

A king is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the

people gazinglie doe beholde: and […] the people who seeth but the outward

part, will euer judge of the substance, by the circumstances, and according to

outward appearance.6

The court masques produced during James’s and his successor Charles I’s reigns perhaps

increased this sense of the staging of the monarch. Masques were a form of festive courtly

entertainment that became regular fixtures at the Stuart court in England. Comprising music,

dancing, scripted drama, elaborate choreography, and increasingly fabulous theatrical

effects, the court masques were the most spectacular form of entertainment of the early

seventeenth century. Accepting that the king was indeed to be judged on outward

appearances, the masques were used to harness and mould these appearances into a

substantial iconography of kingship. The masques enacted and represented the king’s

authority through a scripted evening of speech, dance, music, and spectacular theatrical

effects irradiated with dense symbolism. Though primarily used to praise the monarch, the

masque could also advise and, in so doing, offer oblique criticism of king or court.

The writers of the masques themselves often demonstrate an anxiety that their symbolic and

iconographic programmes were so abstract or arcane as to be generally impenetrable, and

feared that ‘many in […the] audience would be incapable of recognizing what was going

on.’7 Indeed accounts from audience members suggest responses ranging from boredom to

Francis Bacon’s outright dismissal of the entire genre as mere ‘Toyes.’8 The complex staging

of kingship in the masques paradoxically exacerbates the problems of misinterpretation that

James warns of in Basilicon Doron. James remained an aloof spectator of court masques

and was anxious to maintain control of his texts and images. As he admitted

in Basilicon Doron, he only published an authorised version of that particular text because an

unauthorised text was printed, forcing him to:

6 James VI, Basilicon Doron, I, p.163. 7 D. Lindley, ‘Introduction’, in D. Lindley (Ed.), Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605-1640 (Oxford, 1998), pp .ix-xvii, xi. 8 F. Bacon, ‘On Masques and Triumphs’, in M. Kieman (Ed.), The Oxford Francis Bacon, 15 Vols., (Oxford, 2000), XV, p. 117.


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publishe and spred the true copies thereof [and] by this preface, to cleare

suche parts thereof, as in respect of the concised shortnesse of my style, may

be misinterpreted therein.9

The royal text, and even the royal ‘style’, disseminated amongst the public, here becomes

radically unstable, and James’s official publication is an attempt to reinforce his and its

authority through reiteration and a proliferation of prefatory material. Walter Ong argues that

‘print encourages a sense of completion,’ whereas ‘manuscript culture had preserved a

feeling for a book as […] an occurrence in the course of conversation.’10 James’s

intervention, though it was an attempt to stifle that conversation by harmonising

interpretation with the univocality of the printed royal word, demonstrates the ultimate fluidity

of even printed text. The Stuart masque – a form that marries the already unstable written

word with a baffling array of visual imagery – though ostensibly a celebration of authority,

could become a site of uncertainty and confusion.

The masques of Charles’s reign subtly shifted emphasis away from the Jacobean focus on

the unitary monarch as the fountainhead of virtue and grace, to an idealised, Neoplatonic

iconography of love. This love was epitomised not in Charles’s elevated solitude but in his

relationship with Queen Henrietta Maria. The queen and, for the first time, the king appeared

in several masques themselves and, in so doing, broke down the final barriers between court

and performance. Their active participation suggests a fuller recognition and endorsement of

the iconography of the masques themselves. Indeed Stephen Orgel argues that Charles

became so involved in their production that he ‘was not merely being entertained by his

masques; the form was an extension of the royal mind.’11

Describing the masques of Ben Jonson, Orgel argues that ‘every masque concluded by

merging spectator with masque, in effect transforming the courtly audience into the idealized

world of the poet’s vision.’12 In the Caroline masques a significant but subtly different

structural blurring of boundaries emerges. William Davenant’s The Temple of Love (1634)

casts Henrietta Maria as ‘Indamora’, a symbolic representation of divine love, who is

travelling towards Britain to restore and reveal its temple but who is blocked by the

antimasque of the magi. Masques increasingly included ‘antimasques’, where a group of

disruptive agents had to be banished from or integrated into the masque proper. After

9 James VI, Basilicon Doron, I, p. 13. 10 W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London, 1993), pp. 132,125. 11 S. Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA., 1975), p. 43. 12 S. Orgel, ‘Introduction’, in S. Orgel (Ed.), The Complete Masques, (New Haven, CT., 1969), pp. 1-39, 2.


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dispelling the antimasque of the lecherous Magi she steps through the proscenium arch: ‘the

Queen being seated under the State by the King, the scene was changed into the true

Temple of Chaste love.’13 Here the movement of the masque departs from the Jonsonian

model described above. Indamora, the idealised figure of chaste love, leaves the masque to

sit ‘under’ the king in a sign of decorous obedience and submission and, through this chaste

and properly ordered love emanating from the state, the masque world is transformed and

the true symbolic climax achieved. After this metamorphosis the masque moves beyond a

mere symbolic tableau and dramatizes the revelation of the ideal through staging the

meeting and courting of two chaste lovers. Sunesis and Thelma (‘which intimate the

Understanding and the Will’)14 enter the temple and sing a brief courtship duet:

Sunesis: Come melt thy soul in mine, that when unite,

We may become one virtuous appetite.

[…]

Both: When perfect Will, and strengthened Reason meet,

Then Love’s created to endure.15

Their dialogue elucidates the crux of the masque’s aesthetic. Love, presented

as a ‘virtuous appetite’, is valorised as the force that reveals and impels us

towards the other virtues. The ‘perfect will’ and ‘strengthened reason’ that form

the basis of pure love are intended as more than just an abstract concept, they

are a pattern for personal and public life. As Sharpe has argued, the Caroline

masques celebrate love not as

carnal pleasure but […] a Platonic union of souls that represented the victory

of higher reason over appetite. Platonic love was an ideal form of government

because it led not to forceful regimen but to self-regulation.16

Though chastity was a prime feature of the love celebrated in Caroline masques, it found its

greatest expression not in a virginity such that ‘She that has [it] is clad in complete

steel,’17 but in the marriage bed. Contemporaries such as Edward Hyde, the first Earl of

Clarendon, understood and engaged with this royal program of self-presentation,

13 W. Davenant, The Temple of Love, The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, (Eds. J. Maidment and W. H. Logan), 5 Vols. (Edinburgh, 1872), I, pp. 281-316, 302. 14 Davenant, Temple of Love, p. 287. 15 Davenant, Temple of Love, p. 303. 16 K. Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603-1660 (New Haven, CT., 2010), p. 262. 17 J. Milton, Comus, Complete English Poems, (Ed. Gordon Campbell) (London, 1992), pp. 57-91, 421.


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proclaiming that ‘they were the true idea of conjugal affection, in the age in which they

lived.’18 The Magi of The Temple of Love complain of Indamora and her followers that ‘They

raise strange doctrines, and new sects of Love: / […] and practice generation not / Of bodies

but of souls.’19 However, one of the central features of Caroline imagery was the fecundity of

Charles and Henrietta Maria’s union. Their chaste love did not just regenerate their own

souls but through it they became the virtuous soul of the nation. Their marriage also

engendered both new bodies and new souls in their children, and we are told that their line

will ‘in their off-spring never cease, / Till time’s too old to last an hour.’20 These images of

exemplary marriage are further explored in Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum (1634)

where we are told by Mercury that:

Your [Charles and Henrietta Maria’s] exemplar life

Hath not alone transfused a zealous heat

Of imitation through your virtuous court,

By whose bright blaze your palace is become

The envied pattern of this underworld,

But the aspiring flame hath kindled heaven.21

Here the love of Charles and Maria has triumphed to transform not just the court but even

the Olympian pantheon. Jove, we are told, has declared an end to sexual license among the

gods and the

Lawgiver himself in his own person observes his decrees so

punctually; who, besides, to eternize the memory of that great

example of matrimonial union which he derives from hence, hath

on his bedchamber door and ceiling, fretted with stars, in capital

letters engraven the inscription of CARLOMARIA.22

18 E. Hyde, Selections from Clarendon, (Ed. G. Huehns) (London, 1953), p. 100. 19 Davenant, Temple of Love, p. 292-293. 20 Davenant, Temple of Love, p. 304. 21 T. Carew, Coelum Britannicum, Court Masques, pp. 166-193, 52-57. 22 Carew, Coelum Britannicum, pp. 244-248.


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The fusion of Charles and Henrietta Maria into one being at once recalls the Platonic conceit

that human beings were once joined in double bodies.23 Simultaneously, the fusion forms a

significant part of Charles’s presentation of his own rule inasmuch as ‘from the moment his

wife landed on English soil, [he] made his marriage a very public expression of his

rule.’24 The key emphasis of Charles’s self-presentation through the masques is consistently

not on himself as an isolated and elevated monarch, but as a husband and father to his wife

and children as well as the state. The nation was repeatedly figured as an affective family in

early modern discourse. James referred to the monarch as the ‘communis parens’25 or

common parent of the people, and the Caroline masques form the most extensive

exploration of the aesthetics of a government figured as a loving family.

The discourse of government as family was acknowledged by Hyde who noted – with

reservations – that:

The king’s affection to the queen was of a very extraordinary alloy; a

composition of conscience, and love, and generosity, and gratitude, and all the

noble affection which raise the passion to the greatest height; insomuch as he

saw with her eyes, and determined by her judgement.26

This passage demonstrates a realisation of masque imagery in politics but Hyde concludes

that ‘it was not good for either of them.’27 The masques themselves contain dissenting and

destabilising voices. Coelum Britannicum, one of the most complex and ambitious masques,

contains eight antimasques and, in the speeches of Momus, sustained and uneasy satire.

The antimasques of Coelum are somewhat unique in that they are not banished or

reconciled by the revelation of the ideal. Instead Momus – a stock Olympian figure of

mockery, but also strongly associated with criticism of tyranny – engages in dramatic

dialogue with them; assessing and rebuffing each antimasque in prose laced with sarcasm

and lewd jokes. He summons them with a heraldic formula, mockingly occupying a regal

linguistic space and displacing the patterned pentameters of the Olympian’s chosen herald,

Mercury. With his sneering declaration of: ‘Oyez, Oyez, Oyez, […] after mature deliberation

and long debate, held first in our / own inscrutable bosom and afterwards communicated

with our / Privy Council, seemed meet to our omnipotency [etc.]’28 Momus usurps a particular

ceremonial language of the court and destabilises the decorous process of regal address

23 Plato, Symposium, (Trans. A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff) in J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis, IN., 1997), pp. 457-505, 189e. 24 Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 233. 25 James VI, Basilicon Doron, I, p .115. 26 Hyde, Selections, p. 100. 27 Hyde, Selections, p. 100. 28 Carew, Coelum Britannicum, pp. 385-403.


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and reply between Mercury and the royal spectators, and indeed disrupts the entire Jovian

mission to Britain. The masque, despite its production at the centre of court is not univocal,

and Momus refuses to be contained by the normal structures of the masque; he arrives

uninvited, and, unprompted, he leaves before the final resolution: ‘I came in bluntly without

knocking, and nobody / bid me welcome, so I’ll depart as abruptly without taking leave, / and

bid nobody farewell.’29

The transformation or banishment of the antimasque by the simple revelation of the ideal

does not function uncontested in either the masque or the world of

politics. Davenant’s Salmacida Spolia (1640) was the last masque performed before the

outbreak of Civil War and registers significant tensions both within court and within the very

structure of the masque itself. In Salmacida Spolia the scene of the antimasque is Britain

itself where a Fury whips the surrounding seas into a rage. We are greeted with ‘a horrid

scene […] of storm and tempest. No / glimpse of the sun was seen, as if darkness confusion,

and deformity had / possessed the world and driven light to heaven.’30 The Fury incites the

winds to blow ‘Until you raise the seas so high / That waves may hang like tears in the sun’s

eye.’31 The sun here is clearly Charles, whose position is both panoptic and all-illuminating,

and, crucially blinded by the events of 1640. Charles is not called upon or indeed capable of

dispelling the storms of sea or state. Instead the antimasque in some senses resolves itself,

an expression perhaps of hope rather than confidence. Davenant’s masque represents a

final fossilisation of the form in the face of mounting factional tensions. The cracks in the

iconographic façade are revealed in the very stasis of the symbolic structure deployed. The

antimasque proper of the Furies departs before the arrival of the forces of good, allowing

none of the interaction between them that made Coelum Britannicum so dynamic. There

follow twenty entries and departures of comic antimasques which, like the Furies, absent

themselves before the re-emergence of the ideal. The closing scene sees the king ascend

the mountain of honour and the queen descend to meet him from the heavens. The lovers,

united and centre stage, are greeted with this encomium:

So musical as to all ears

Doth seem the music of the spheres,

Are you unto each other still,

29 Carew, Coelum Britannicum, pp. 789-791. 30 Davenant, Salmacida Spolia, Court Masques, pp .200-213, 93-95. 31 Davenant, Salmacida Spolia, pp. 105-106.


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Turning your thoughts to either’s will.

All that are harsh, all that are rude,

Are by your harmony subdued;

Yet so into obedience wrought

As if not forced to it but taught.32

The emphasis is still on the didactic icon of the king and queen’s love, and the capacity for

that love to transform chaos, but the retreat from a dramatized engagement and resolution to

a series of disjointed tableaus signifies the growing anxiety in the ability of the king’s image

to reconcile division.

The Antimasque of Civil War

Abraham Cowley’s Civil War attempts to bring the gravity of epic to the events it chronicles,

but it is also informed by elements of a significantly different genre, the Caroline masque.

The image of Charles that Cowley develops is imbued with the language of the masques’

encomiums, and even the Carlomarian strand persists. After the indecisive battle of Edgehill

(1642), here presented as resounding royalist victory, the poet asks: ‘Could this white day a

gift more gratefull bring? / O yes! It brought blest Mary to the King.’ The king and queen are

reunited at:

Keinton the Place that Fortune did approove,

To bee the noblest Scene of War and Love.

Through the glad vale ten thousand Cupids fled,

And chac’ed the wandring Spirits of Rebells dead.

Still the lowd sent of powder did they feare,

And scattterd Easterne Smells through all the Aire.

Looke, happy Mount, looke well for this is shee,

That toyld and travaild for thy victory.33

Carlomaria and the cupids perform a masque-like transformation of the antimasque of

Edgehill battlefield into a lover’s glade. Unlike the most successful masques though, this

masque fails to incorporate and domesticate the forces of antimasque; instead it only

succeeds in displacing them. The final couplet reminds us too of the very real political toils of

32 Davenant, Salmacida Spolia, pp. 421-428. 33 A. Cowley, Civil War, (Ed. A. Pritchard) (Toronto, 1973), 1, pp. 491-492, 495-502.


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Henrietta Maria in securing continental arms and aid for her husband, a factor that would

become a key point of attack for the king’s opponents and part of a strategy for displaying

both his uxorious weakness and his Machiavellian plotting. With the outbreak of civil war, the

icon of a loving and fruitful royal couple and a government patterned on the Platonic ideal of

love can be seen to have ultimately failed in reconciling or even containing the forces of the

antimasque.

For royalist poets the civil war constituted a fundamental break in the fabric of society. The

ordered hierarchy of the world – that both created and was imagined by the masque – was

ruptured. This fracture can be seen, like Inigo Jones’s great stage device the

turning machina versatilis, to discover a world of Furies and disorder ‘Beneath the silent

Chambers of the Earth’34 and behind the idyllic vision of the British polity. In Cowley’s poem,

as in Salmacida Spolia, Britain itself becomes the theatre of antimasque. The tumults are

figured as a storm ravaging the country:

from the North we find

A Tempest conjur’d up without a Wind.

So soone the North her Kindnesse did repent,

First the Peace maker, and next War she sent.35

Indeed the storms and upheavals are such that they disjoint the country from itself, firstly

Scotland from England and then ‘Ireland which now most basely we begin, / To labour more

to loose, then Hee [Henry II] to win.’36 The English too are enmeshed in this civil uncoupling

as the ‘high borne Welch’ give the ‘the barbarous Cyclop[ean]’37 rebels of Birmingham a

proverbial ‘Welsh correction.’38 The fracture of British history – a history of incorporation,

unification, conquest, and rebellion – visibly splits open across the war-torn British

landscape.39 The spectre of self-destruction recalls the aphorism of the then recently

translated and popular, Henri, Duc de Rohan: ‘England is a mightie Animal, which can never

dye except it kill itself.’40

34 Cowley, Civil War, 2, p. 365. 35 Cowley, Civil War, 1, pp. 193-96. 36 Cowley, Civil War, 1, pp. 19-20. 37 Cowley, Civil War, 2, pp. 76-77. 38 W. Shakespeare, King Henry V, (Ed. T.W. Craik) (London, 1995), 5.1, p. 78. 39 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History, 47/5 (1975), pp. 601-621, 609-10. 40 H. Duc de Rohan, A Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendom, (Trans. H. Hunt) (Paris, 1640), p. 35.


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The typology of the great flood is enlisted to further emphasise the epic and biblical

proportions of the civic carnage:

Thus like a Deluge War came roaring forth,

The bending West orewhelm’d, and riseing North.

A Deluge there; and high red Tides the while

Oreflowd all parts of Albions bleeding Ile41

In Civil War, more powerfully than in any of the court masques, the forces of chaos and

disorder threaten the good and just rule of the king. Against the roll-call of natural disasters

and civil-blood-letting the panegyric to the Thames establishes a vision of the proper

ordering of the nation’s natural environment now obscured by strife:

Good, reverend Thames, the best belov’d of all

Those Noble floods that meete at Neptunes Hall,

Londons proud Towers which thy faire head adorne

Move not thy glorie now (but grief and scorne).

Thou griev’st to see the white-nam’d pallace shine,

Without the Beames of its owne Lord and Thine.

Thy Lord, who is to all as good and free

As thow, Kind Flood, to thine owne Banks canst bee.42

In this passage it becomes clear that Charles exists in harmony with a landscape that he

‘adornes’ and rules, and in return is crowned and glorified. The imagery of Charles as a

refulgent king of light and whiteness is consistent throughout the poem and with earlier

masques, but it should be emphasised that Charles is notable in the poem largely for his

silence and absence. Writing in a situation of ongoing conflict, Cowley was still awaiting the

final Caroline victory that would re-order the British state – something which never

happened.

Civil War presents a procession of antimasques but history refused their resolution. Cowley

stages a demonic ‘parlament’ chaired by the ‘Stygian Tyrant,’ and, in place of the

conventional epic catalogue of the armies, he portrays a pageant of grotesque sectaries and

rebels.43 In an image imbued with the destruction of the old monarchical order, the puritans

are described thus: ‘Gods Image stampt on Monarchs they deface; / And ‘bove the Throne

their thundring Pulpits place,’ and the Anabaptists are reduced to the ‘dismall Hær’esy of

41 Cowley, Civil War, 2, pp. 1-4. 42 Cowley, Civil War, 1, pp. 333-340. 43 Cowley, Civil War, 2, pp. 504-507.


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wild Muncers crew, / Hether twelve hundred stout Mechanicks drew.’44 ‘Mechanic’ is a term

that has masque pedigree and was used in Jonson’s Loves Welcome at Bolsover to

describe the antimasquers following Vitruvius. John Denham also deployed the word in a

similar denouncement of the plebeian nature of the commonwealthsmen in his ‘Prologue to

his Majesty’:

This spacious Land their Theater became,

And they Grave Counsellors, and Lords in Name;

Which these Mechanicks Personate so ill.45

In Cowley the satire is dynamic and energetic, if embattled and bitter; Carlomaria are

conspicuous by their absence. After his defeat at Naseby (1645) some of Charles’s personal

correspondence was captured and subsequently published by the Parliamentarians. It is

striking that absence is the first charge the publishers lay against Charles:

a prince seduced out of his proper sphear; one that has left the seat in which

he ought, and hath bound himself to sit, to sit (as the psalmist speaks) in

the Chair of the scornfull, and to the ruine (almost) of three kingdoms.46

The publishing of his letters marked a new phase in the representation of the Charles, and

further highlights the instability of interpreting royal texts. Those who published it highlighted

Henrietta Maria’s attempts to bring in foreign arms and troops, and the king’s dialogue with

the Irish confederates as proof of his betrayal of the law, parliament, and people. The letters

to Henrietta Maria are themselves framed with the everyday tokens of the love and affection

that had been so idealised in the rarefied setting of the court masque. Paradoxically – and

wholly against the publishers’ intentions – the minutiae of state, of family news, of the

conferring of titles, and the daily business that makes up the bulk of the letters lose a certain

focus between preambles such as ‘Dear heart, I wrote to thee yesterday […] the subject of it

was only kindnesse to thee; which, I assure thee shall ever be visible in all my actions,’ and

conclusions such as ‘I have now no more to say, but praying for and impatiently expecting of

good news from thee, I rest eternally thine.’47 The conceit of the masques that imagine the

‘polity as affective family’ is unconsciously realised in the letters between husband and wife,

and the icon of Charles as a monarch patterned on familial love and devotion was both

44 Cowley, Civil War, 3, pp. 61-62, 87-88. 45 J. Denham, ‘The Prologue to His Majesty’ in T. H. Banks JR (Ed.), The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, (New Haven, CT., 1928), pp. 94-5, 95. 46 The Kings Cabinet Opened (London, 1645), p. i. 47 Charles I, Kings Cabinet., p. 3, p. 4.


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fractured and revivified by his enemies. 48 The publication of his private correspondence

perhaps shattered the esoteric and mystical display of ideal kingship developed by the

masques, but it displayed ‘a man, a husband, flawed but human, with whom other mortals

could empathize.’49

Royalist Topographies of Order and Disorder

Intimately related to the world of masque and antimasque, order and disorder, are the

topographical and pastoral spaces evoked by royalists and regicides alike. Harmony and

order can be celebrated in apostrophes to the natural environment, but pastoral is a double-

edged genre, one that offers retreat from the fallen world of state politics, but also constructs

a space to think with and refract that chaos across a rural landscape or garden. Written in

1642, John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill explores a specifically royal space and history, but,

within the circumscribed limits of Windsor and its environs, the civic turmoil of the day

intrudes and is to some extent integrated. As John M. Wallace argues ‘The view from a hill

afforded him the needed distance to see all the problems of the crown and the capital in

perspective.’50

The poet hails ‘Windsor […] (where Mars with Venus dwells. / Beauty with strength) above

the valley swells.’51 Though proclaiming Windsor the seat of Mars and Venus continued

some of the Carlomarian strands from the court masques, it was, by 1642, problematic. Not

only had the king fled London in January 1642, but the irony of choosing the famous

adulterers Mars and Venus as symbols of the scrupulously chaste royal couple ironically

undermines Denham’s image. The poem offers a vision of a particularly regal topography, in

the words of William Rockett ‘the places in the landscape of “Cooper’s Hill” – St Paul’s

Cathedral, Windsor Castle, Chertsey Abbey, and Runnymede – are creatures of

sovereignty.’52 In a way that echoes the court masques, these ‘sovereign’ spaces are

integrated with a wider world of spiritual and mythological significance. Carew describes the

scene at the close of Coelum Britannicum as showing:

In the firmament […] a troop of fifteen stars,

48 K. Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England (London, 2013), p. 211. 49 Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule, p. 160. 50 J. M. Wallace, ‘Cooper’s Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641’, ELH, 41/4 (1974), pp. 494-540, 497. 51 Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’ in The Poetical Works, pp .63-89, 39-40. 52 W. Rockett, ‘”Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court”: “Cooper’s Hill” and the Constitutional Crisis of 1642’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 17/1 (1993), pp. 1-14, 1.


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expressing the stellifying of our British heroes; but one more great and

eminent than the rest, which was over his head, figured his Majesty. And

in the lower part was seen afar off the prospect of Windsor Castle, the

famous seat of the most honourable Order of the Garter.53

This vista shows the British constellations, the king, and Windsor in harmonious perspective,

locating regality in a supernatural hierarchy, a ‘golden chain’ that reaches down to the very

stones of Windsor. Cooper’s Hill performs a similar conceit in describing the Thames as it

skirts the hill:

This scene had some bold Greek, or Brittish Bard

Beheld of old, what stories had we heard,

Of Fairies, Satyrs, and the Nymphs their Dames,

Their feasts, their revels, & their amorous flames:

’Tis still the same, although their aery shape

All but a quick Poetick sight escape.54

The royal grounds are peopled with the demi-gods of classical mythology and amongst them

moves a herd of deer: ‘that noble herd / On whose sublime and shady fronts is rear’d /

Natures great Master-piece.’55 The king is capable of stepping into this world of half-fantasy

to hunt the stag. The hunting of the stag, a traditionally regal pursuit, confirms Charles’

position at the head of the hierarchy of nature, and the stag – itself a monarch of the valley

beasts:

disdains to die

By common hands; but if he can descry

Some nobler foes approach, to him he calls,

And begs his Fate, and then contented falls.

So when the King a mortal shaft lets fly

From his unerring hand, then glad to dy,

53 Carew, Coelum Britannicum, pp. 1010-1014. 54 Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’, pp. 229-234. 55 Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’, pp. 237-239.


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Proud of the wound, to it resigns his bloud,

And stains the Crystal with a purple floud.56

The symbolic slaying of a king by a king takes on prophetic resonances in the uneasy

situation of 1642, and its position in the wider structure of the poem encourages us to read

the hunt in the context of an evaluation of sovereignty and kingship. Immediately after the

king’s ‘mortal shaft’ looses a royal purple ‘flood’ from the Stag, comes a meditation on the

Magna Carta and the proper relations between king and subjects. The poet exclaims that:

Here was that Charter seal’d, wherein the Crown

All marks of Arbitrary power lays down:

Tyrant and slave, those names of hate and fear,

The happier stile of King and Subject bear:

Happy, when both to the same Centre move,

When Kings give liberty, and Subjects love.57

When the poem was written king and subject were patently not moving to the same ‘centre’,

indeed Charles expected ‘love’ and increasing factions among his subjects ‘liberty.’

Denham’s is a moderate voice, a royalist, but one perhaps sympathetic to those opposing

so-called arbitrary government. However, he goes on to chastise the commons who take

advantage of the king’s liberality: ‘The Subjects arm’d, the more their Princes gave, / Th’

advantage only took the more to crave. / Till Kings by giving, give themselves away.’58 This

insistence on the king’s fault consisting simply in excessive generosity was to become a

royalist trope and is echoed throughout the arch-monarchical text Eikon Basilike. There

Charles explains his decision to call the Long Parliament in saying ‘I hoped, by my freedom

and their moderation, to prevent all misunderstandings.’59 Continuing the imagery of the stag

hunt, Cooper’s Hill depicts a sovereign wounding itself and paints in the stark, almost

Machiavellian, words of ‘tyrant’, ‘slave’, ‘arbitrary power’, and ‘advantage’ a very real and

immediate struggle for the position and meaning of the king. The language, abstracts him

entirely from the poetic fantasy of the sprite inhabited riverbank. The confluence of kingly

liberality and the grasping of subjects is resolved in the poem into an image of unbridled

56 Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’, pp. 237-239. 57 Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’, pp. 329-334. 58 Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’, pp. 337-339. 59 Eikon Basilike, (Ed. P. A. Knachel) (New York, 1966), p. 3.


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force. A river in spate, and partially dammed, to ‘a Deluge swells: / Stronger, and fiercer by

restraint he roars, / And knows no bound, but makes his power his shores.’60

The ‘deluge’ of Cooper’s Hill, echoed in Cowley, forms a powerful royalist trope that was

revisited even in regal pronouncements. In ‘The King’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions

of Parliament’ the British polity is imagined as a river that has absorbed the three

constitutional tributaries of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. This gives to the

kingdom:

the conveniences of all three, without the inconveniences of any one, as long

as the balance hangs even between the three estates, and they run jointly on

in their proper channel (begetting verdure and fertility in the meadows on both

sides) and the overflowing of either on either side raise no deluge or

inundation.61

In Civil War the fertility engendered by this balance is destroyed. The poems presents a loss

of control of the natural environment and the inversion of order depicted ultimately in

Charles’s loss of the navy: ‘The Sea they [the rebels] subject next to their Commands, /

The Sea that Crownes our Kinges, and all their Lands.’62 Although the rebels temporally

control the lands and shipping, Charles’s authority is confirmed by the sea, and he will

eventually reassert it over the landscape to reinstitute the proper realignment of power. The

centrality of the sea to the strength of the British monarchy is a poetic trope with a heritage in

masques such as The Masque of Blackness and reaches its apogee in John of Gaunt’s

famous speech – elicited by another moment of civil crisis – in which Britain is described as:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

[…]

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house.63

60 Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’, pp. 356-358. 61 ‘The King’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament, 18 June 1642’, in J.P. Kenyon (Ed.), The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688, (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 21-23, 21. 62 Cowley, Civil War, 1, pp. 165-167. 63 W. Shakespeare, ‘Richard the Second’, in P. Alexander (Ed.), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, (London, 1991), pp. 446-479, 2.1, pp. 40-48.


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Naturally for a maritime nation, water imagery provides a fertile strain for imagining and

representing the power of the king. Whilst Cowley’s and Denham’s poems from the 1640s

utilise the language of floods and inundations and depict the loss of royal authority and naval

control, poetry written after the Restoration connects with and reverses these images. After

1660 Cowley and Edmund Waller both published ekphrastic poems on Henrietta Maria’s

rebuilding of Somerset House. The significance of these poetic and architectural restorations

is further emphasised if we recall that Somerset House was the main theatre used for

staging the court masques before the Civil War and was used as the site of Charles’s

execution. Cowley’s ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’ is written in the voice of

the palace itself, and meditates on the Civil Wars’ local effects on the building. The house

complains:

In all my rooms and galleries, I found

The richest figures torn, and all around

Dismembered statues of great Heroes lay;

Such Naseby’s field seemed on the fatal day.64

The poem adopts an inward perspective to read the misfortunes of a particular place into a

wider matrix of parallel events, but the situation of the house on the banks of the Thames

allows the restored palace to look outwards once again. Throughout the poem the river is

referred to affectionately and possessively as ‘my Thames’, ‘imperial river’, and ‘fair

River.’65 Control of the river is explicitly linked with the authority of the restored monarch as

the house looks across the water ‘Tow’rds the white palace where that King does reign /

Who lays his laws and bridges o’er the main.’66 Laws are flung across an unruly nation like

bridges across the power of a river which ‘does roar and foam and rage’ but in the face of

majesty ‘recomposes straight and calms his face.’67 The authority of the monarch (installed

in the very seats that Charles I had shamefacedly quit), partially undoes the damage that

had ‘dismembered’ the palace’s statues and the icon of kingly power at the battle of Naseby.

Waller’s poem on the same subject also emphasises the harmony realised by the Queen

Mother’s restoration of the palace:

This, by the Queen herself designed,

64 Cowley, A., ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’, in J. Griffin (Ed.), Selected Poems of Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller and John Oldham, (Harmondsworth, 1998), pp. 29-31, 7-10. 65 Cowley, ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’, pp. 69, 88, 93. 66 Cowley, ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’, pp. 77-78. 67 Cowley, ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’, pp. 73, 74.


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Gives us a pattern of her mind;

The state and order does proclaim

The genius of that royal dame,

Each part with just proportion graced,

And all to such advantage placed

That the fair view her window yields,

The town, the river, and the fields.68

Palace, city, river, and countryside are integrated in the royal vision – afforded by the

elevated perspective from the windows of Somerset House – into a harmonious whole.

Cowley’s poem concludes with a vision of the Thames’ waters and the king’s fleets pouring

out through the world’s oceans: ‘Thy mighty Master’s sovereign fleet, / Which now trimphant

o’er the main does ride, / The terror of all lands, the ocean’s pride.’69 This exultant vision

banishes the nightmares of the Civil War which were grounded for Cowley in images of

London’s betrayal, of the loss of control over the sea and navy, and ultimately the

destabilisation of the English landscape itself which could conceal a hellish foundry of

corrupting metals and demonic plots. It is a recurring image of the masques that ‘the opening

of the earth is troped as an inherently dangerous process, since it is associated with both

antimasque as well as masque elements,’ yet it also represents access to a realm of ‘mineral

wealth.’70 The material world is realigned by the return of the Stuarts; the dangers of opening

the earth are set aside in Cowley’s topographical poem which indulges in a vision of global

empire and trade buoyed on the waters of the Thames: ‘The peaceful mother on mild

Thames does build, /With her son’s fabrics the rough sea is fill’d.’71

After a Republic – a New Age and a New History

When Cromwell finally refused the offer of a crown he stated that:

Truly the providence of God has laid this title aside providentially. De facto it is

laid aside […] it has been the issue of a great deliberation as ever was in a

68 Edmund Waller, ‘Upon her Majesty’s New Buildings at Somerset House’, Selected Poems of Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller and John Oldham, pp. 82-83, 31-38. 69 Cowley, ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’, pp. 100-102. 70 P. Berry & J. E. Archer, ‘Reinventing the Matter of Britain: Undermining the State in Jacobean Masques’ in D.J. Baker & W. Maley (Eds.), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 119-134, pp. 128 ; 129. 71 Cowley, ‘On the Queen’s Repairing Somerset House’, pp. 107-108.


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nation. It has been the issue of ten or twelve year’s civil war, wherein much

blood has been shed […] And God has seemed providentially not only to strike

at the family but at the name.72

He lays emphasis on the lead and the paper bullets that had been fired in resolving the issue

and the finality of that deliberation. The consequences of this radical discourse were far

reaching; so much so that Lawrence Stone claims the American revolutionaries ‘invoked the

same ideals hammered out in the fires of England’s revolutionary century.’73 Events soon

belied Cromwell, and the rapid collapse of the Protectorate after his death opened the door

for the restoration not just of the family, but of the name of king in Charles II. The preceding

decades had profoundly affected British conceptions of the citizen, and the monarchy.

Though Charles re-established a centralized monarchy the iconography of kingship may be

seen to have changed, at least in part. A substantial body of poetry, prose, and drama

formed a discourse that reformulated or contested the fundamental images of monarchy.

Charles’s return was hailed by Katherine Philips in terms directly appropriated from the

apocalyptical Puritan typologies that posited the Protectorate as the New Jerusalem.

Overlaying England with the history of Israel, she presents the nation as ‘Old Jacob’ and

Charles as ‘Joseph that was preserved to restore / Their lives, who would have taken his

before.’74 Masques, central to the self-presentation of Charles I, were not rehabilitated at the

new court, though poets such as Waller and Cowley could still envisage the monarch sitting

at the head of an ordered universe. The playhouses were reopened, and the symbolism was

noted by supporters such as Denham: ‘They that would have no KING, would have no Play:

/ The Laurel and the Crown together went.’75 For Denham the Restoration constituted a

reordering of the public sphere in accord with the civil graces of art and majesty. Most of the

texts looked at here have been in some way ‘elite’ productions, generally aimed at a small

audience of nobles – in the case of the masques – or a small poetry-reading public in the

case of Denham and Waller, and Cowley’s Civil War went unfinished and unpublished in his

lifetime. However, Denham’s note on the reopening of the playhouses conveys a positive

sense of the accessible and more widely felt socio-cultural consequences of the return of the

monarchy. John Dryden’s ‘Astraea Redux’ hailed in Virgilian strains the return of the

monarchy as the rebirth of a golden age of justice, but admitted that the interregnum had

72 O. Cromwell, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, (Ed. W. C. Abbott), 4 Vols. (Cambridge, MA., 1947), IV, p. 470 73 L. Stone, ‘The Results of the English Revolutions’ in J.G.A Pocock (Ed.), Three British Revolution: 1641, 1688, 1776, (Princeton, IN., 1980), pp. 23-108, p. 99 74 K. Philips, ‘On the numerous accesse of the English to waite upon the King in Holland’, in P. Thomas (Ed.) The Collected Works of Katherine Philips The Matchless Orinda, 2 Vols. (Cambridge, 1990), I, pp. 70-71, 21 ; 23-24. 75 Denham, ‘The Prologue to His Majesty’, p. 94.


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traumatised both the nation and the new king. The young king had suffered the violence of

revolution:

Charles his too too active age,

Which govern’d by the wild distemper’d rage

Of some black Star infecting all the Skies,

Made him at his own cost like Adam wise.76

Charles’s and the nation’s experience of exile made them wise, but after the pattern of Adam

who acquired the knowledge of good and evil with the consequences of pain and death.

However the whiteness of clemency and mercy were imagined to resolve all public wounds;

Charles’s reign was figured as ‘times whiter Series […] begun / Which in soft Centuries shall

smoothly run.’77 However traumatic the decades of civil war and regicide had been, they had

also opened up new discourses that could not be entirely silenced by appeals to a new Pax

Carolus.

Despite the decision not to revive court masques (and it must have been a conscious

decision) their iconography remained largely viable in early Restoration poetry and Dryden’s

vision of a new golden age implicitly posits that the masque imagery of kingship would

continue to shape England’s future. However, aside from the masques and the sacral

imagery of kingship, another ideological legacy survived the Restoration and was wielded by

John Milton to undercut and erode the legitimacy of the regal icon. John Milton’s History of

Britain (1670) was begun circa 1649 as a Livian project to uncover the glorious remains of

England’s past – located firmly in an imagined Saxon commonwealth – but his critical

reading of the sources revealed a history of kin-slaying, treachery, adultery, rape, and

usurpation; a history of continuous falls with little respite. For Milton the ancient Britons and

the Saxons were ‘Progenitors not to be glori’d in.’78 Milton’s images of amoral authority

undercut monarchical claims of ‘virtuous appetite’ or of a reordering of the nation’s moral life.

Instead English history tells the story of a people so degraded by imperial, episcopal, and

monarchical abuse that whenever they gained freedom they ‘shr[a]nk more wretchedly under

the burden of their own libertie, than […] under a foren yoke.’79 For Milton this is clearly

76 J. Dryden, ‘Astraea Redux’ in J. Kinsley (Ed.), The Poems of John Dryden, 4 Vols. (London, 1958), I, pp. 16-24, 110-113. 77 Dryden, ‘Astraea Redux’, pp. 292-293. 78 J. Milton, The History of Britain in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, (Ed. D. M. Wolfe et. al.), 8 Vols. (New Haven, CT., 1971), V, Part 1, p .61. 79 Milton, History of Britain, p. 131.


20

history with a contemporary and prophetic edge – indeed Willy Maley terms it a ‘Trojan

Horse bequeathed to the imperial monarchy.’80 The History of Britain, for all its gloomy

content, is a hopeful book. It is a late synthesis of Renaissance Humanism, and it calls for

those ‘who can judiciously read’ to uncover its radical truths.81 Milton calls for a new image

and history of man, as the histories of kings (and therefore their futures also) are no more

worthy of recounting than ‘Wars of Kites, or Crows, flocking and fighting in the Air.’82

As I have argued above, the Caroline court masques had developed and performed a highly

sacralised and ideologically coherent iconography of kingship, and furthermore these images

and tropes were utilised in Royalist pastoral, topographical, and even epic poetry. This

iconography primarily centred on the moral purity of the monarch which found its purest

expression in fruitful marriage, and was deemed to be a force capable of reordering the

nation into harmonious union. Finally, the work of poets such as Milton and Dryden

demonstrates the possible trajectories for engagement with this iconography after the

Restoration of the monarchy.

80 W. Maley, ‘The Canon: The History of Britain. By John Milton’, Times Higher Education (28. 01. 2010) < https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/the-canon-the-history-of-britain-by-john-milton/410131.article > (Accessed: 18/10/17). 81 Milton, History of Britain, p. 129. See also Maley, ‘The Canon: The History of Britain. By John Milton’. 82 Milton, History of Britain, p. 249.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/the-canon-the-history-of-britain-by-john-milton/410131.article



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